<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>The Ballad of Big Mike by ArgentumCivitas</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28539048">The Ballad of Big Mike</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentumCivitas/pseuds/ArgentumCivitas'>ArgentumCivitas</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Reno: 911!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Accidents, Angst, Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Minor canon divergence, lot of hurt little bit of comfort, the imagined real story of how jim got promoted, the most unlikely of friendships, what a terrible world what a beautiful world</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 22:35:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,098</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28539048</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentumCivitas/pseuds/ArgentumCivitas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After Big Mike’s Rocket Rascal stunt goes horribly wrong, Jim Dangle visits him in the hospital. Their conversation proves to be…enlightening.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jim Dangle &amp; Big Mike</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>/r/FanFiction Prompt Challenge #21 / January 2021, Genuary 2021</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Ballad of Big Mike</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This story is based on the revival of Reno 911! that came out in 2020. Yes, I am one of the people who paid to watch it, because I’m like that. It was mostly the same as the old Reno, but so much more, somehow. For any long-time Reno fans, there shouldn’t be too much in here that comes as a surprise. And as with everything Reno-related, canon remains a loose set of guidelines, rather than a strict mandate.</p><p>I’ve invented a last name for Big Mike because canon has never actually provided him with one.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jim Dangle got a text in the middle of the day from someone who’d been saved in his contacts as “Sexy Mountain” with an accordion emoji at the end, and all it said was, <em>Renown Regional T-543</em>. He thought for a moment that it was a code of some kind, an invitation to a party next weekend, but instead of being thrilled or delighted or intrigued, he just felt tired. The scene in Reno was always the same these days, the same faces at the same places, everyone pretending at the beginning of the night like they were meeting for the first time and then, as the drugs took hold and the hookups began, starting to peel back the stories of their mutual acquaintanceship like the layers of an onion, ending in tears on more than one occasion. Maybe that’s why he’d been spending more and more time lately in his off hours, in the continual search for novelty, edging closer to the fringes of the social circles that brushed up against the fringes of the social circles that revolved around Big Mike.</p><p><em>Big Mike</em>, he thought. <em>That has to be what that’s about</em>. Mike’s “Rocket Rascal” stunt that he’d threatened to live-stream, four days ago, had concluded with a fifteen-foot fall into an empty pool after he’d accidentally set himself on fire, and before he’d taken the plunge, he’d called the accordion-playing member of his crew a “sexy mountain.” Jim had put the whole thing entirely out of his mind until now. He’d assumed that Mike was fine—he usually was after these kinds of things—but maybe that wasn’t the case? Renown was the largest and most high-tech hospital in Reno, and that code sounded like it could be a room number.</p><p>But there was no way he was going to find out if he was right by heading down there in broad daylight, or even tell anyone he knew that he was considering going down there in the first place. Everyone else had their own shit going on. Jones and Garcia, who had gotten hastily married three weeks ago to keep Garcia from getting deported, were both too busy taking the fake-but-not-actually-fake marriage seriously to themselves but lightly to one another, like a romantic comedy playing out in real life. It would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic. Rizzo was far too squirrely to get a handle on, always twitchy and complaining about his kids, and Declan was too prickly and proud, with intimations of his own dark secret life trickling through the façade he put on, and neither of them had known Mike for as long as the rest. And Junior had turned into a real family man since bringing Jee-Yun back from Korea and since their own kids arrived. Those two were almost obscenely happy together, and it had been one of the best things that had ever happened to Junior, but it just reminded Jim of how he didn’t have anyone else to share his own life with. Deb was long gone and Leslie had fallen into the deep end of the right-wing conspiracy-theory crowd and no matter where Jim ended up, he was always reminded of his responsibility to serve and protect, paranoid that someone would unravel a loose string that he’d forgotten to tie up and bring everything he’d built crashing down on his head. Reno had only grown smaller and smaller over the years and now he was trapped, more and more isolated and alone.</p><p>So Jim drove over to the hospital once he got off work at eleven that night, the streets of downtown deserted, not entirely sure why he was going there or what he was looking to find but feeling compelled to go, nonetheless. It was well past the end of visiting hours, so he bluffed his way past the sentinel at the information desk by claiming that he was there on official Sheriff’s Department business, and wandered through the dim, half-deserted hallways until he ended up in the Tahoe tower, where the room numbers all started with the letter T. He stepped off the elevator on the fifth floor and heard the unmistakeable sound of Big Mike’s voice echoing down the hallway—"FUCK YOU, BITCH, YOU’RE HOLDIN’ OUT ON ME!!!”</p><p>Jim paused at the nurses’ station, where the two nurses there stopped their conversation as soon as they saw him. “Can I help you, officer?” the blonde one said, with the mutual understanding of the long-suffering public servant.</p><p>“I’m sorry to be here so late, but I’ve got to talk to someone as part of an investigation,” he said, as a nurse in blue scrubs came out of a room down the hallway that he presumed was Mike’s. “I assume he’s awake.”</p><p>The blonde nurse scoffed in derision. “You need to talk to <em>him</em>? Good luck.”</p><p>Jim turned on his most charming smile, the one he used for dealing with elderly women and small children. “If he’s talking to me, then he won’t be harassing you, will he?” he asked, rhetorically.</p><p>The nurse who’d just come from Mike’s room, pretty and with her dark hair pulled back in a French braid, joined the other two nurses at the station and said, “Go on, then, if you want. But he’s not due for his meds for at least another half-hour.”</p><p>“Thank you,” Jim said, to all three nurses, as he headed for Mike’s room. It was easy to find; it was the only one in the hall with the door open, and if the nurses were watching him go, Jim didn’t notice or care. “Hey, Mike,” he said as he entered the room, closing the door behind him.</p><p>“Dangle? What the fuck are you doin’ here?” Mike said, turning his head in the dim half-light of the room, and Jim got a full look at the ruin that was Mike. Mike's nose was broken and his face was a riot of scrapes and bruises underneath and around the graying four-day stubble, some still bright purple, some healing to a sickly yellow-green. He had an IV port in both of his arms and the flop-sweat sheen of someone coming down off a long meth high, plus there was a dark blue bruise blooming across the back of his right hand, where the paramedics had probably placed the first IV. The room stank of hospital cleaning solution, old booze, and stale urine, and Jim took a seat in the uncomfortable chair between the bed and the window. It was clear that Mike wasn't going anywhere under his own power for the foreseeable future.</p><p>"I got a text from your friend," he said. "I wanted to come by, see how you were doing. But if anyone asks, I'm doing an investigation." He pulled out his notebook, put it on the bedside tray table, but made no move to write anything down.</p><p>"Which friend was it?" Mike said. It didn’t sound like he expected an answer.</p><p>"It just says 'Sexy Mountain' in my phone," Jim said, and Mike laughed, then grimaced in pain.</p><p>"Gonna climb that sexy mountain one of these days," Mike said, softly, to himself.</p><p>"Mike, what the fuck happened?" Jim asked. Mike had been fine when they left that day. At least, Jim had assumed that Mike had been fine. He was usually fine after his shenanigans. The simmering cauldron of intoxicants that he swam in daily seemed to insulate him from serious harm. Or, at least, it always had before...until now.</p><p>Mike looked up at the ceiling, avoiding Jim's eyes. "You limp-dicks left before the paramedics got there. Broke my fuckin' leg in four places. Doctors’re puttin' some kind of space-age bone in there in the morning. And it hurts like you wouldn't fuckin’ believe." He almost yelled the last part, to the nurses who couldn't hear him through the closed door.</p><p>"Jesus, Mike," Jim said. He couldn't think of anything else to say, and he felt horribly guilty. They had egged him on to do the stunt after their camera guys had stopped filming, mostly out of morbid curiosity and a belief that nothing could ever truly hurt Mike, for real. He clearly remembered talking right into the camera lens that Mike had set up for his live stream, facetiously saying, "I blame you," to everyone watching, but not really meaning it. It made him wonder, who were those people, out there on the Internet, who would never see the aftermath of a lazy afternoon spent looking for the hottest thing online? At least the fire extinguisher had knocked out the live stream before Mike jumped.</p><p>"Now you're here, Dangle, I’ll tell you, my head's the clearest it’s been in years," Mike said, looking back at him with a sly smile. "I think they're givin' me ketamine, knocks all the memories loose." It was a casual admission and didn’t sound like a threat, but it made Jim tense up anyway. Mike had spent the better part of the last twenty-five years exploring the boundaries of exactly what meth does to the human brain, washed down with copious amounts of hard alcohol, and he was his own favorite lab rat. But who knew what long-buried memories the come-down, and the ketamine—if it really was ketamine—were going to bring to the surface?</p><p>"You don't say, Mike," Jim said, trying to stay calm. Mike loved nothing more than to antagonize the members of the Sheriff’s Department in any way he could, like a demented and obsessively focused agent provocateur. Was this just more of that, or was it something deeper—something from long ago?</p><p>"Was that you who got stuck in a glory hole over at my place earlier this month?" Mike asked, and Jim almost laughed.</p><p>"It was," Jim admitted, with no small amount of relief that that’s all it was. He’d gotten over the initial embarrassment; their camera crew had caught the whole thing on tape for the show. It was one of those parties that he'd gone to on his day off that drifted from place to place, picking up and casting off people as it went, until he found himself at Mike's at seven in the morning, rolling on some pretty decent ecstasy and wearing his second-best pair of pleather chaps and stuck in a door and having to be carried out by the same people he'd need to lecture the next day on the appropriate places to wear their new inclusive gender-pronoun buttons. Mike had been there, too, calling him “Dennis” the whole time and pretending they didn’t know one another. He'd seen the whole thing, from the beginning to the ignominious end, and was even press-ganged into carrying one of the corners of the door out of the house. So what if Mike was only just now remembering it? That, at least, was nothing serious to worry about.</p><p>"You owe me a fuckin' door and I’m comin’ by to collect once I get outta here,” Mike said, but Jim only half believed him. Once the doctors let Mike go, he’d probably head straight back into the biggest meth binge of his life, to make up for lost time, and forget everything except where the next hit was coming from. “Write it down, in your fuckin’ cop notebook,” Mike continued.</p><p>“I’ll remember,” Jim said, leaving the notebook where it was. He had every intention of forgetting all about it once he left the room.</p><p>Mike fixed him with a crafty look, and Jim thought, <em>wait a minute, maybe he’s not quite as far gone as he lets on</em>. They’d joked around the department for years about Mike’s brain slowly turning into Swiss cheese, his antics the evidence of his twisted thought process, but there was an escalating kind of logic to the stuff that Mike did. He seemed to know, frustratingly, just precisely how far he could push all of them before they lost it completely. “You won’t, but I will, and that’s not all I’m rememberin’,” Mike said. “Didn’t I used to work with all of you?”</p><p>“It was a long time ago,” Jim said. The tape from that bust had been mis-labeled 1988—it was more like the early nineties, sometime, he didn’t want to remember the year exactly. He’d gone through so much effort trying not to think about everything around that day and the day after, that it was nearly a year and a half before the guilt stopped waking him up at night. And now, whenever Jim thought back to those two pivotal days, it seemed like they’d happened to someone else.</p><p>“No, now I remember it. All of you fuckers used to work <em>for</em> me,” Mike said, triumphant with the revelation. “I was the lieutenant, just like you are now. I’d say ‘Jump,’ and you’d say ‘Yessir, how fuckin’ high, sir,’ every fuckin’ time.”</p><p>“You never came back to work again after that bust,” Jim said, almost by reflex, repeating the line from the story that everyone told about that day. That day when they’d tossed one of the first big meth labs in Reno and everyone changed forever, Junior with his sunglasses as armor and himself with his short-shorts and Trudy brought back as just a remnant of who she’d been. And Mike, the last time he’d seen the old Mike, carrying two big glass jars of bright white meth and giggling to himself like a madman the whole time as he got away, right before the cavalry showed up. He’d told that version of the story so often, they’d all repeated it over and over again as accepted fact, but less and less as time went on and it calcified into Sheriff’s Department history. These days, it only came up when rookies joined the department, and only as a couple of fleeting sentences after they got a call out to Mike’s place.</p><p>“Didn’t I?” Mike said, fixing Jim with a stare that seemed to burrow right into the back of his head, and giving him a knowing smirk at the same time. And Jim realized, in that moment, that Mike hadn’t forgotten nearly as much over the years as he’d claimed to forget, that he probably still remembered every detail—and, even worse, that he knew exactly what Jim had done the next day.</p><p>Mike had shown up for work one more time and no one else knew that he had, except the two people in that hospital room, because Jim was the one who’d gotten there first and cleaned up the aftermath. Mike had gone to town on the personnel files in the Sheriff’s office, strewn everything all over the place like he was looking for something, or like he was simply trying to send a message. But sitting neatly on top of the Sheriff’s desk, amid the whirlwind, was a perfectly typed, albeit long and somewhat rambling, letter of resignation that also recommended Mike’s replacement, and that went on and on about the upstanding accomplishments of one deputy, whose name was James.</p><p>James Garcia.</p><p>Jim saw the letter when he was cleaning up the rest of the files and reading through it pissed him off more than anything. He’d been with the department for almost four years at that point and Garcia had just shown up six months ago. It wasn’t fair that now he’d have to answer to someone who just got here, someone who he’d seen beat the shit out of more than one suspect on more than one occasion and with the worst marksmanship out of everyone and who was on a friendly first-name basis with all the local Klan members.</p><p>He knew that if he only got the chance, he could do a much better job of managing the department. Jim had to be the best choice out of everyone left, but the hands-off Sheriff wouldn’t see it that way—he’d see Mike’s “resignation” first, before the full details of the bust trickled up, and he’d just go with whatever information was in front of him at the time. If Jim even so much as hinted that Mike obviously wasn’t in his right mind when he wrote that letter and quit, then he’d look like even more of a jealous, petty asshole and he could kiss any hopes of a promotion goodbye until at least the next election and maybe even longer.</p><p>Instead of destroying the letter, like he’d wanted to do when he first saw it, Jim checked the time—the Sheriff wouldn’t be in for another hour—and quickly made a decision that would change his life, irrevocably.</p><p>It was a stroke of luck that Mike had used the idiosyncratic Sheriff’s personal typewriter to compose his letter.</p><p>And another that the Sheriff had a brand-new bottle of white-out in his top desk drawer.</p><p>And yet one more that “Garcia” and “Dangle” both had six letters in them.</p><p>A week later, Jim was giving the morning briefings and scheduling shifts and directing the deputies like he’d been meant to do it all along.</p><p>The whole story had come flashing back like it had happened yesterday, though Jim hadn’t thought about the whole thing, start to finish, in over twenty years. But it seemed like everything had all worked out in the end. He had certainly never breathed a word of any of it to anyone else, and the only other person who knew for sure that anything different was supposed to happen had done his absolute best to be as unreliable a witness as possible. But how much of it did Mike remember, and especially now?</p><p>“Why did you recommend Garcia?” Jim asked, softly. He’d never had a chance to ask Mike that question that had bothered him, so much at first, and then gradually less and less as he settled into the job, into the new parts of his life. This conversation had ripped the old scab clean off and exposed the wound again.</p><p>Mike cackled, and then winced in pain. “’Cause he didn’t want it and you did. God, Dangle, you wanted that promotion so bad I bet you woulda sucked my dick for it,” Mike said. Jim didn’t want to admit it, but back then, he probably would have. “But you figured out a way around that, you clever bastard,” Mike continued. “The first time you showed up at my place with those bars on your collar, I knew you found my fuckin’ letter.”</p><p>“Did you tell anyone else, Mike?” Jim asked, dreading the answer. Had Mike let the secret slip during one of his binges? Who else out there knew the truth?</p><p>“What do you think?” Mike said. “Way I see it, you go to that much trouble for a shit job, you can fuckin’ have it.” With some difficulty, he picked up the call button from where he’d dropped it on the bed, hit it five times as quickly as he could. <em>I can’t believe he kept it to himself all this time</em>, Jim thought. He slumped back in the chair, breathing a sigh of relief, as he heard a knock on the door and the pretty nurse came into the room. “Brenda?!” Mike yelled at her. “You got my drugs yet, you fuckin’ bitch?”</p><p>“I’ve told you, sir, my name is Jane,” she said, smoothly, and Jim looked at her again. Jane looked a little familiar. He could have sworn he’d seen her somewhere before, but he couldn’t quite remember where. Jane crossed her arms over her chest, gave Mike a stern look. “It’s still a little early, but if you can apologize and ask nicely, I’ll get them for you,” she said.</p><p>Mike sighed, a look of resignation on his face. “I’m sorry I called you a fuckin’ bitch, can I please have my drugs,” he said, in a mocking, sing-song tone of voice. Jane just rolled her eyes.</p><p>“I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said, leaving the room and closing the door behind her. Mike grinned at Jim, a bruised and morbid deaths-head smile.</p><p>“I know her name’s not Brenda, I’m just fuckin’ with her,” he said. “I’ve been callin’ ‘em all Brenda.”</p><p>“Where’s the real Brenda?” Jim asked. Since he’d started including Mike among his casual acquaintances, he hadn’t heard Mike mention her name once. He half expected to hear that she’d overdosed.</p><p>“Haven’t seen her in years,” Mike said, with a cough. “I got ahold of a real bad batch a while ago and she was gone by the time I got through it. She could be anywhere by now.” He looked up at the ceiling. “One thing’s for sure, she ain’t in Reno anymore.” He said this softly and almost with regret, all of his usual bravado gone.</p><p>Jim got up from the chair, moved over to the window, where the curtains were mostly drawn, with the city lights visible through just a thin crack. “How do you know she’s not in Reno?” he said, looking back at Mike.</p><p>“Trust me, Dangle, I fuckin’ know,” Mike said. “I’m not anywhere near as dumb as <em>you</em> think I am.” And after the conversation they’d been having, that was certainly the truth. There was only one more thing that Jim could think to ask about, one more thing that he had to know from this oddly coherent and strangely lucid Mike.</p><p>“What made you do it, Mike?” he asked, and they both knew what he really wanted to know. What made Mike decide to abdicate all responsibility and give up everything he had for this kind of life? To choose his kind of freewheeling anarchy over law and order, to reject every last mandate of society and to grab on to the chaos with both hands? To plunge head-first into that unknown ocean and dive down and never reach the bottom?</p><p>“Sucks shit always havin’ to be the one in charge,” Mike said, with a knowing look up at him. “You finally figure that out?” And Jim realized, in that dim little room, that Mike was right. Being the boss had put Jim permanently apart from everyone else. It had been nice, for a time, to wield the little bit of power that he had, but that feeling had worn off years ago. Now it was an endless round of making schedules and settling petty disputes and the grind of performance reviews and morning briefings where he had to read sponsored content along with the announcements, and not a single one of the deputies at the department was simply his friend anymore. They lied to him and manipulated him and pulled pranks on him, over and over again, and because he didn’t want them to hate him, he let them get away with it, laughed at himself right along with them. Over the past couple of years, Jim had begun to hate himself for allowing it to happen like this for so long, and he had no idea how to stop it—or if it was even possible to make it stop.</p><p>Mike had put that feeling of creeping despair and futility into words so perfectly and succinctly that there was no better way to say it. Of all the sad revelations that this conversation had held, the most depressing of them all was that Mike was probably the closest thing Jim had to a friend anymore, that Mike understood him better in that moment than anyone else in his life ever had, Deb and Leslie included. He could have cried, and probably would have, if not for the interrupting knock on the door that broke the spell.</p><p>Jane came in the room, closing the door behind her, with a small syringe full of something clear and viscous-looking, as Jim turned to the window, blinked hard in an attempt to keep the tears at bay. He took a few deep breaths, looking out at the wavering city lights, as he heard Jane put on a pair of gloves and say to Mike, “Are you ready?”</p><p>He turned back around to see Mike just nod at Jane, as she uncapped the syringe and hooked it into the IV in his right arm. Jim noticed that she pushed the plunger slowly, almost gently, as Mike closed his eyes. Jim wasn’t watching Mike, though—he was watching Jane, as it finally came to him, where he remembered when he’d seen her before and how he knew who she was. But he didn’t trust himself to speak in that moment without breaking down, and he refused to give Mike the satisfaction of seeing or even hearing him cry.</p><p>Once the syringe was empty, Jane pulled it out of the IV port, dropped it in the sharps container in the room, and briskly took the gloves off, dropping them in the trash can. “That should be much better,” she said, to Mike, without acknowledging Jim in any way.</p><p>“Thanks, Brenda,” Mike said, without opening his eyes. Jane looked down at Mike—a soft look, full of tenderness and affection—but it was gone in a moment, as she shook her head and left the room, like Jim wasn’t even there.</p><p>Jim looked back at Mike again, considering everything that had happened—not just tonight, but everything that had brought them to the point where they were in their lives right now. He saw that there was far less separating him and Mike from one another than he had first thought, that with just a few more wrong turns along the way, it would be him broken in the bed, yelling out for Deb instead of Brenda, his thoughts leaking out of the holes punched through his mind. Deep down, underneath it all in the core of their selves, they were the same. Mike had turned one way and Jim turned another, but it all could have gone differently for either of them at any time. When he looked back at his life, how many of those little moments had there been, the choices he didn’t know he was making, that had all made such a difference?</p><p>In the back of his mind, that knowledge was what kept Jim from ever truly losing himself in the moment whenever he was at a party, whether it was in Reno or Palm Springs or the Castro or even all the way out in Mykonos. He’d see this prophetic future whenever someone started chopping up a bright white line of meth in the bathroom, reminding him of that slippery slope that it’s much too easy to start tumbling down. Just one step too far and he’ll be lost forever. He understood all of it so clearly now.</p><p>Mike leaned his head toward the window, eyes still closed, and said, “Dangle, you still there?”</p><p>“Yeah, I’m still here,” Jim said, slow and careful, wiping away a couple of tears from his eyes. There was nothing else that he could say, nothing else that needed to be said.</p><p>“Thanks for visitin’ me,” Mike said, slurring his words, his breathing growing measured and even as he fell asleep. Jim waited for about a minute longer to compose himself, breathing deeply in an attempt to regain some kind of control of his emotions again, then picked up his completely blank notebook and left the room without a sound, closing the door quietly behind him.</p><p>It was after midnight and Jane was the only one left at the nurses’ station, which filled Jim with relief. <em>Moment of truth</em>, he thought as he approached. He started to speak, but she cut him off before he could. “You’re not really investigating anything, are you?” she asked.</p><p>“No, I’m not,” he admitted. And, since he couldn’t see anyone else around, he said, softly, “And you’re Mike’s Brenda, aren’t you?” He was pretty sure that was how he recognized her.</p><p>Jane quickly looked up and down the hallway, to make sure they were alone, and once she was satisfied, nodded her head. “Jane’s my middle name,” she said. “I left him six years ago, got clean, went back to school, changed my last name. Hospitals always need more nurses. And no one else here wants to put up with him.”</p><p>“He doesn’t know it’s you,” Jim said. He wasn’t accusing her of anything. It was just a statement of fact, incredible as it sounded.</p><p>“No, he doesn’t, and when you come back, don’t tell him,” Jane said. One more secret to add to the list. “He’s got enough problems right now,” she continued. “Did he tell you what’s really wrong?”</p><p>“He said a broken leg and surgery in the morning,” Jim said, but he wasn’t surprised to hear that there might be more.</p><p>Jane made a dismissive noise, in the back of her throat. “That’s some of it. He ruptured his spleen, too. The doctors say it’s stable, but I’ve seen it before. Those kinds of things are touch and go.” Jim heard her voice catch, a little, put that together with the soft look he’d seen on her face after she’d given him the drugs, and realized that Jane, formerly Brenda, might not have still been in love with Mike, but she definitely still loved him, at least a little bit. Enough to make sure that he was comfortable and to watch over him while he slept off the consequences of his own actions. If Jim ever lost himself that much, down in the formless abyss of bad choices and unfortunate repercussions and delayed reckonings, would he be lucky enough to stumble upon that kind of compassion, to feel that sort of grace?</p><p>“Anyway, it’s late, and you really should go,” Jane said. “Did you get what you needed?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Jim said. Because he had, in a manner of speaking.</p><p>***</p><p><strong>Michael “Big Mike” Kalambourakis</strong>, age 54, died February 18, 2020, following complications from surgery, at Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada. He was born December 9, 1966 in Sparks. He was formerly employed as a lieutenant of the Reno Sheriff’s Department. Many of his friends and neighbors affectionately referred to him as “the mayor of his block.” He is survived by his wife, Brenda Stamford, and their son, Stewart Kalambourakis. Friends will be received from 6 to 8 PM Thursday, February 20, at Mountain View Mortuary, 425 Stoker Ave, Reno. A funeral service will be held at Saint Anthony Greek Orthodox Church at 10 AM Friday, February 21, with internment at Mountain View Cemetery immediately following. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to Join Together Northern Nevada.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>May his memory be eternal.</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>